The lands of Ukraine endure as a breakwater-jetty between the tides of East and West, crashed and buffeted by their ebb and flow, and worse for the wear as a result. The etymology of the country’s name itself refers to her status as a borderland. Her Slavic population clashed with incoming Asian invasions in the 13th century. The neighboring kingdoms of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, and Russia carved and re-carved her ownership throughout the 14th to the 19th centuries. In the early 1930s, these most fertile lands in all of Europe were imposed with a devastating, artificial famine—the Holodomor—by an eastern regime seeking to subdue her westward gazing towards freedom and self-rule. She was barraged during World War II by the skirmishes of German and Russian armies. The Catholic church jockeyed for influence in this traditionally-Orthodox country, offering Byzantine-rite allowances to keep parishes under Roman jurisdiction, and ultimately breaking the roots of Ukraine’s spiritual unity. A new, controversial Orthodox administration was recently elevated by foreign powers, causing similar turmoil, division, and disunity amongst the Orthodox Christians in the country. Russia’s proximity and power has many times swelled then crushed her calls for national identity. Even the current political tides roll back and forth between a more eastern conservative/traditionalist approach and a western trending towards the social, technological, and economic norms of today’s developed world. Ukraine is a country sliced, diced, and scarred by history, forced by location and historical consequence to carry the burden of balancing on this razor’s edge. It’s a nation too often divided against itself, desiring freedom and identity, but not knowing where to seek it, or from Whom. The title of her national anthem, tellingly, projects a gloomy but perhaps realistic outlook: “Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.”
My maternal great-grandmother’s village, Błażowa, was part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria—once a crown-land of the Austria-Hungarian Empire whose lands were redistributed to Poland and Ukraine in 1918. Her hometown now resides within the borders of Poland. Baba was fluent in both Ukrainian and Polish; I grew up with Ukrainian pyrohy and Polish kielbasa both. Her husband emigrated to the United States from parts of Galicia now within the borders of Ukraine. As a result, my own ethnicity remains amorphous: 75% Slovak from dad and half of mom combined; along with 25% Galician, or 12.5% Ukrainian and 12.5% Polish, depending on where I choose to draw the historic geopolitical lines. I genetically and spiritually inherited an ancestry of a shifting-borderland identity.
Ukraine’s Baptism into Christianity in the year 988 is often recognized as the beginning of the golden-age of her national identity. Great Prince (now Saint) Volodymyr sent out emissaries to near and distant lands with a single task: to seek out the world’s greatest religion and make it his own. One group returned from witnessing the impressive Orthodox cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Their report was enough to convince the heart of the prince: upon witnessing the Liturgy there, they reported back, “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.” He united the disparate, local tribes under one rule, converted his realm to Christianity through the influence of his grandmother, and planted the first seeds of a national spiritual identity through the adoption of a common faith tradition.
I also inherited this Eastern-Orthodox Christian heritage through my Eastern European roots. It was in Baba’s house in America that the local immigrant community held their first Liturgies prior to founding a church. My family traveled to my paternal grandmother’s Pennsylvania mining town each January to celebrate Old-Calendar Nativity (Christmas) on January 7th, complete with a full spread of the traditional Holy Supper with our extended family (“kids’ table” and all). Baptized as an infant, I celebrated first Confession and Communion as a child, and served as an altar boy in my church, trained by my older cousin, later training my younger brother in the same. “Cradle Orthodox,” as we’re characterized: those anointed with the Faith of their family’s choosing, even before the development of conscious memories.
Just as my childhood parish had a social hall larger than the church itself, so too did it seem to emphasize the social and cultural traditions of Ukraine more than those of the faith. Each Wednesday evening, my brother and I attended Ukrainian dance classes. He danced, I didn’t, choosing instead to follow my introversion into the adjacent kitchen to work on that night’s schoolwork. Despite my non-participation, I unconsciously absorbed every fiery, foot-tapping note of the music. I still connected with the swirling dresses of the women and the shiny, billowing pants of the men, all dancing through the seasons and flirtations of life. The willowy ribbons of a woman’s vinok trails a rainbow of beauty in her wake, as her bunches of red-beaded necklaces shwick their own music just slightly off-beat with her footfalls. Even on complete strangers, the red-and-black embroidered costumes beacon like lighthouses: the heart beneath such a shirt beats with a common ethnic identity. These dances—this music, especially—stirs my soul the way bagpipes must for the Scottish. Ukrainians write the best polkas (apologies to my Slovak roots), and even their near-raucous energy instantly settles me into a deeply spiritual state of mind.
The traditional foods, too, offered physical and spiritual nourishment both. The iconic pyrohy/varenyky are doused with melted butter and onions; indeed, to label any food “Ukrainian,” one only needs to add butter and onions. The preparation of holubtsi (stuffed cabbage) is nearly as complex and ceremonial as anything that takes place in the church. In a large-group congregation, men cook the cabbage, women trim the cabbage, and only the select elders are tasked with gently and lovingly rolling that cabbage with rice and meat and tucking those stuffings within. Heap an ethic-festival sampler-platter with these two darlings, add a kielbasa dripping with grease, an ice-cream scoop of lumpy paprika-garnished potato salad, some obligatory fermented-cabbage slurry, and the heart leaps equally with cholesterol-induced palpitations and the chance to ingest the sustenance of my ancestors. No wonder the dances are so energetic: plenty of calories to burn after eating a traditional greasy-Ukrainian meal!
Our church prayer books placed opposing languages on facing pages: Ukrainian on the left of a page-spread, English on the right. The exotic Cyrillic lettering became a mysterious, sacred text to me, used only in ritual, spoken only in prayer, and evoking a spiritual context through its sounds. Our services were offered half in English, half in Ukrainian, and by listening to the priest and the choir, I taught myself the proper pronunciation of the foreign words, if not their meanings. With some effort and focus, I can still pronounce a whole sentence written in Cyrillic lettering. Many religions have a sacred language that’s only used in the context of ceremony and prayer: an obvious, audible indication that something has changed, something different is happening that shifts us out of our usual day-to-day babblings. To this day, when I hear two headscarved babas whispering in Ukrainian to each other, I assume that they’re discussing the deepest of theological questions. In reality, they’re likely just smack-talking Nadia’s burnt butter-and-onion travesty.
Church and culture lived in harmony within the borderlands of my ancestral heritage. St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Church: for me there was no separation between the “Ukrainian” and the “Orthodox” in the name. The Ukrainian-ness of the parish was held with the same esteem as its religiousness, for better or for worse. Lift high the chalice, imbibe deeply the beet-kvas within: both became landmarks on the road to salvation, cohabiting the same spiritual recesses of my heart.
My first pysanky experiences as a child stand out as the most profound and lasting of those cultural-spiritual connections. Classes were offered during Great Lent, but not in the social hall where the rest of the ethnic activities were held. Pysanky classes took place in the rectory, in the very house where our priest and his wife lived. Extra-sacred space, reserved for the high-holy man of my childhood, that off-limits private residence that few entered, and only on the most special of occasions.
Adding to the mystery, pysanky classes were held in the basement of the rectory. We entered through a side door off the driveway, like a secret back-entrance to an underground bat-cave. The stairway itself was long and narrow—chilly too—lit by yellowed fluorescent lights, and descending deeper than any basement I had ever visited. Bare walls—bare white walls which gave the impression of sinking into a formless, colorless void.
The door opened to the left, and we’d step into the warmth and light of this secret workshop. Church-style pews lined each wall, and several long tables were arranged in a rectangle in the center of the room. Plastic bins of mixed craft supplies occupied the underside of the pews, each with some bit of ribbon or plastic flower garlands, glittery paper or rough-Styrofoam blocks hanging out the side. Even as a child with little sense of proper décor, I could tell that the indistinct goldish shag carpet left much to be desired. The room smelled of ethnic creativity, though: a hint of damp candle smoke with high notes of vinegar and beeswax.
We’d usually arrive fashionably late, and our priest’s wife, Pani Julia, would be seated at the head of the rectangular table arrangement. She and the circle of children would pause from their hunched concentration to look up and smile at us, the new arrivals. Pani (pah’-nyee) wore a Ukrainian shirt as black as her beehived hair, sporting red embroidery that matched the too-red lipstick on her big, grandmotherly smile. We’d get a welcome and an invitation to sit and join the others, picking our spot at the newspaper-covered tables.
Pani offered us a stack of pysanky design books. We’d choose a reasonable level of challenge. She’d sit at her high-seat, put down her own egg, and deftly pencil in our design while we watched over her shoulder. No lathe or fancy tools; the grace of experience guided her hands. To my childhood eyes, I thought nothing special of her incredible talents; it was one of those things that adults can just “do.” She’d add the details, then lean over and raise the egg. Looking at us over her black-rimmed glasses-on-a-chain, she’d explain the first steps we’d take once we returned to our seat. Her deep-red smile was encouragement and permission both: a child’s rare and delicious chance to play with fire and hot metal and melted wax.
We worked in holy silence, concentrating on our egg, able to overhear the occasional guidance that Pani would give to another budding artist’s design. Parents sat on the pews and shared the latest news: the original “Ukrainian Facebook” before the internet and cell phones corrupted the purity of church gossip. Our gathering of usually-chatterbox kids sat mute, unable to talk and egg at the same time. Protruding tongues often mirrored the movements of small fingers, short legs kicked back and forth from too-high chairs, a raised head was enough to call a parent over for help or praise or both. There on our newspaper-covered altar, we made pysanky-prayers with uncoordinated hands and innocent hearts. As we worked the designs onto the shells, so too did those designs leave impressions on our souls, there in that deep-down catacomb-temple of cultural art.
A fellow child-artist once spent hours over several of these weekly Tuesday sessions working on his egg design. At last he finished—a surprise gift for his grandmother to make her proud. But while carrying it from table to varnishing rack, he dropped it and it shattered beyond repair. He was young enough and innocently gullible enough, however, to believe Pani’s reassurances: “Oh, my dear, don’t you worry! We’re going to fix this!” A loving hug and some sympathy from the others calmed him as he put his trust in our elder matriarch.
Between sessions, she re-made his entire egg anew. He came the next week and she presented to him “his” beautiful pysanka, whole, intact, and ready to be given as a gift from his heart. She fixed it, just like she said! It wasn’t until later that he learned of the quiet kindness behind her secret deed. She never spoke a harsh word, never discouraged; her demeanor was that of an enthusiastic grandmother nurturing this art in her grandchildren. Patience and love filled everything that she did, even to the point of remaking an entire egg to soften the pain and disappointment of a child. Any patience and understanding, encouragement and style that I now possess in my own egg-teaching efforts must have been unconsciously absorbed through the glow of kindness that surrounded our Pani Julia. My friend reports at age forty that he never again dropped another egg.
I learned from the best, not just an art, but the art of life. A lovingkindness that encourages and endures. The incredible and oft-overlooked power of parental support. The blessed silence of creative-art prayers. The satisfaction of gently holding in my own hands a beauty that I created with my own hands. Beauty that was later varnished and given a place amongst the other eggs in our home, displayed on the noble shelves of the ornate breakfront cabinet in the dining room, right next to the fancy plates that only guests were deemed worthy to use. Sacred art borne from sacred roots, created in the holy atmosphere of a holy place, separated from the cares of the world, surrounded by loving people, and all within the greater context of our church and parish family. There on the borderlands between childhood and adolescence, I, too, was developing my own spiritual identity through participation in the cultural and faith traditions of my ancestors. And after my own adolescent rebellions and wanderings, those same eggs would later call me back to this dormant ancestral identity.
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